Hi everyone, hope your having a very lovely Sunday afternoon! I’ve had a great weekend because I’ve been super productive. Yesterday morning I started by sorting through all the household paper work filing things away and filling a bag of documents to shred. I also sorted out my shelves on the book case putting away DVD’s, CD’s and books and today I’m planning on sorting through my clothes and bags (of which there are many!) into piles for the charity shop and eBay. I’ve also been busy in the kitchen making a big batch of lentil soup, a peanut lime sauce, roasted aubergine hummus, brown rice and barley and some raw crackers. I’m exhausted now!

Getting the base for my lentil soup going!

I also had a walk into town and back yesterday to meet up with the lovely Jess for a Starbucks fix. It was great to see her, she received a lovely complement from a stranger too, gotta love those communal coffee shop tables!

This morning I enjoyed a glorious run in the sunshine. I went out without the Garmin again and just ran for the enjoyment of running. No idea how far or how fast, I think I was out for about 40 minutes or so? When I came back I made a tasty Courgette Banana Bread Green Smoothie:

I made this with spinach, courgette, frozen banana, vanilla sun warrior protein powder, maca, ground flax, water and ice and topped it with dried cherries and lemon salted roast almonds, yum!

Yesterday mornings breakfast was delicious, Vanilla Chai Pear Oatmeal with Tofu Yoghurt and Walnuts!

I cooked the oats in some Pukka Vanilla Chai tea, added a chopped pear and vanilla stevia then topped with some tofu yoghurt, chopped oats and cinnamon.

For lunch I made use of some kelp noodles I’d won in a competition on the Viva Pure Facebook page – I rinsed then soaked them in filtered water and lime juice then drained them and added some carrot ribbons and a sauce made from 3 tbsp of raw dark tahini, sweet white miso and water. I also added a good amount of fresh parsley:

So good, I love my kelp noodles!

Last night I had an amazing macrobiotic inspired meal. I was chopping up a kabocha squash and thought it looked a bit pale and watery so I decided to try out a recipe from Blissful Bites for pumpkin with apricot and ginger glaze. As it turned out the kabocha was fine and that glaze was utterly amazing! I didn’t think much other than nut butter could make kabocha taste any better but this did. I served it with some steamed greens and quinoa mixed with edamame and parsley. I also added a drizzle of peanut lime sauce:

I’d picked up some limes from the reduced bin at the green grocers (4 for 50p) so decided to make a peanut and lime dressing. I mixed 1/4 cup peanut flour with one tbsp of sesame peanut butter (because I’m all out of regular pb) the juice from one lime, soy sauce and water. I also used it on today’s salad with more of the glazed kabocha, cos lettuce and some finely sliced mange tout:

I also used the lime juice instead of my usual lemon juice in my fave green juice blend:

This was cucumber, celery, parsley, ginger and lime juice, love my weekend juices!

For a snack this afternoon I’ve just had an apple followed by this chocolate berry smoothie using mixed frozen berries, 2 big spring green leaves, a scoop of chocolate amazing grass powder and a tbsp of raw cacao powder blended with water and ice drank out of a pretty mug of course:

So refreshing on a warm afternoon!

I really do love ticking things off the old to do list. I’m currently reading The Happiness Project, and one thing that I’ve taken from it so far is how tackling nagging tasks supports your overall happiness. I certainly feel better for getting those things done! I also know how much easier, cheaper and tastier, next week will be now that I’ve prepped a couple of dishes – I do love my Sunday cook up sessions!

Have you had a good weekend so far? Do you keep a to do list? How do you approach keeping on top of nagging tasks?

Happy Wednesday everyone! I’m having a lovely week off just spending a lot of time pottering around the flat getting caught up on the million things that have been adding to my to do list these last few months! These are my eats and goings on from yesterday (I haven’t started my healthy feast yet, that’s tomorrow), enjoy!

My Tuesday started with a lovely lie in – isn’t it great to wake up naturally without an alarm sometimes?  I did a quick Yoga for Runners podcast before making breakfast. I started with my usual mug of warm water with lemon juice before making a big smoothie:

This contained spinach, beet greens, frozen banana, cup of home made almond milk, hemp protein powder, mesquite, spirulina, midori greens powder, vanilla stevia, xanthan and guar gums, water and ice. I topped it with some pomegranate seeds, Alara in the garden muesli and a small spoonful of sunflower seed butter. I also had a gorgeous vanilla coffee with stevia and almond milk.

I drank green and rooibos tea all morning, then for lunch I made an amazing salad inspired by the lovely Ragnhild! She had left a comment on Sunday’s post with this amazing combo, and my word I have eaten some good salads recently but this was wonderful! This contained romaine lettuce, raw kale massaged with lemon juice and hemp oil, raw beetroot, a large chopped fresh fig, walnuts rolled in honey and sea salt plus more honey and sea salt on top:

I’m a huge fan of any sweet and salty combos and this was amazing! I’ll be enjoying honey and sea salt together a lot in future! I also had a very large sliced honey crunch apple:

As we were having a chill out day I thought I’d make some cookies! I made some Super Charge Me Cookies. I used some raisins, chocolate chips and crunchy peanut butter with flax in the recipe and subbed the maple syrup for brown rice syrup and a touch of water:

I made a few without raisins for James as he doesn’t like them, and a few bigger ones too. I ate one of the big ones as gym fuel along with a mug of Teapigs Popcorn tea and it was absolutely amazing, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside!

I hit the gym and did 40 minutes of cardio on the gym machines followed by my Body Pump class. Unfortunately the instructor forgot her CD so we ended up doing the last release again but it was still a great class.

For dinner I had a really gorgeous plate of roasted sweet potato, brussels sprouts and broccoli with baked marinated tempeh and almond butter sauce:

This was just so delicious! I marinated the tempeh in mirin, shoyu, toasted sesame oil and ume vinegar then baked in the oven. These were my first brussel sprouts of the season and they were perfect roasted in the coconut oil. The almond butter sauce was just almond butter mixed with hot water and a splash of shoyu. Nom!

For dessert I had a big bowl of protein ice cream made with cookies and cream spiru-tein, a small handful of frozen strawberries, stevia, water, ice and xanthan and guar gums topped with cacao nibs and freeze dried berries:

One of the things I’ve been doing to try and curb the late night snackies is to eat dessert a bit later in the evening. I enjoyed this on the sofa while we watched the film Hanna, which was very good!

I actually had a pretty snack free day yesterday, Monday was a completely different story! I do think I’m finding a better balance at the moment than I have done recently, I really feel like I’ve turned a huge corner this last week. I’ve got loads to say around this but I’m saving it for yet another wordy post!

Blissful Bites Giveaway Winner

Congrats to Kate from What Kate is Cooking! Please email me with your address and I’ll get the book posted out! Thanks to everyone that took the time to enter!

Well I am off to do more baking this afternoon! What’s your favourite chill out activity? As well as baking and cooking we’ve been watching loads of movies and enjoying this Indian summer we are experiencing!

Have a great Wednesday and enjoy the rest of your week!

A few weeks ago I was very kindly sent this book to review:

This is Blissful Bites by Chrissie Morgan. This is a book chock full of vegan recipes. It includes chapters for breakfasts, appetizers and soups, salads, vegetable sides,whole grains and carbs, sea vegetables, compassionate proteins and healthy desserts. Each section is divided into either summer, autumn, winter, spring or anytime.

As well as being vegan, all the recipes are healthy and seasonal with a clear focus on macrobiotics, and therefore a lot of recipes are free from onion, garlic and the ‘nightshades’ such as potatoes, peppers and aubergine. I know some people have digestive issues with onions and garlic – this would be a great recipe book for you! There’s also a lot of gluten free recipes, in fact most of the baked recipes use gluten free flour.

Most of the ingredients used in the recipes are kept simple and are therefore easily available. There are a few more specialist ingredients such as brown rice syrup, various gluten free flours like kamut, and the various seaweeds in the seaweed chapter but other than that its mostly standard stuff.

Before getting into the recipes Chrissy gives a great introduction to the plant based diet, common cooking techniques, equipment needed etc. There is also a lot of information interspersed through out the recipes as you go along such as a cooking techniques for veggies, basics on how to cook beans, natural sweeteners and so on.

I decided to try making a recipe from the autumn salad section – the arugula (rocket) – edamame salad with orange sesame vinaigrette:

This was delicious! I did change up a few of the ingredients to use what I had on hand and it still tasted great!

There really are a lot of wonderful recipes in this book that I can’t wait to try such as orange pumpkin ginger french toast, not so forbidden rice salad and ginger cookies! I would definitely recommend this book for vegans and non vegans alike that are looking for extremely healthy and tasty recipes. This would also be a great book for those following a gluten free diet as a fair few recipes are gluten free.

Chrissy also has the brilliant website The Blissful Chef which includes a great recipes section and blog.

I have one copy of Blissful Bites available to giveaway to one lucky reader!

To enter (each of these counts as a single entry – please leave a separate comment for each one):

• Leave a comment to this post with why you’d like to receive a copy of Blissful Bites
• ‘Like’ my Facebook page (link under the follow me section on the right) and leave a comment below stating that you have done so
• Follow me via Google Friend Connect (link under the ‘follow me’ section on the right) or follow me on Blog Lovin or Twitter and leave a comment below stating that you have done so
• Tweet about this giveaway – Checkout @keephealthstyle Blissful Bites GIVEAWAY!
• Post about this giveaway with a link back to this post on your blog and leave a comment below stating that you have done so

Giveaway open to EVERYONE! and closes at 12am GMT Tuesday 27th September 2011, good luck!